Vespers (21 page)

“Excuse me, miss.”

Dori took a quick glance behind her. A thin, white-haired lady was standing in the aisle to her right.

“Yes ma’am?” Dori said.

“Is there something wrong with the lavatory?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Why?”

“I think it’s locked.”

“Maybe someone’s in there.”

“No. I’m sitting right in front of it. No one’s gone in.”

“Well, maybe it’s stuck,” Dori said. “This is a pretty old bus. Maybe one of the gentlemen back there will give it a tug for you.”

“Thank you,” the woman said. “I’ll ask.”

Slowed in the moderate late-evening traffic at the entrance to the bridge, Dori watched in the rearview mirror as the woman made her way back down the aisle. She held the backs of the seats as she walked, then stopped beside a young man. He was probably a college student. He had that look. Muscular, blond, clean-cut. The youth smiled up at the woman, listened to what she had to say, then went back to help her. The restroom was a small compartment on the left side of the bus. He pushed down hard on the handle.

The traffic started to move as she got on the bridge. Dori took her eyes from the mirror and looked ahead. You didn’t see very many things like that in the morning, she thought. Simple courtesies. People who didn’t mind getting off their butts and helping people.

Suddenly, a terrible cry tore through the bus. Dori touched the brake, and her eyes snapped back to the mirror.

The young man was stumbling backward. As Dori watched, he fell across the lap of a young woman who was sitting opposite the restroom. He was waving his hands wildly as things flew from the opened door.The old woman fell backward, landing hard on the rubber flooring. She didn’t get up.

At first, in the subdued light of the bus, the things looked like campfire ash or fall leaves blown by a strong wind. They were swirling forward rapidly, an expanding spiral moving this way and that. Their approach caused most of the seventeen passengers to flail their arms, scream, and duck down. As the things continued toward her, Dori saw what they really were.

Bats.

Shrieks filled the bus as Dori crushed the brake. The vehicle stopped; the bats kept going. Four of the small, tawny creatures were on her a moment later. Their wings were dry and soft as they fluttered against her. She snarled at the bats as they tore at her face and scalp.

“Get off me!”

Dori leaned forward and tried to reach the lever that opened the door. But she retreated an instant later, forced to cover her eyes. She shook her head violently, but the bats wouldn’t leave. They clung to her bobbed black hair and ears, to her slender fingers and knuckles. Every move, every moment brought new pain. She felt like she’d run deep into a thorn bush and couldn’t get out.

Screams bounced through the bus. Burying her eyes in the crook of her right elbow, Dori wrapped the arm tightly around her face. Then she turned herself back toward the dashboard and felt blindly with her left hand for the lever. When she found it, she pulled hard.

The door folded open. The cool, brisk air rushed in off the Hudson River. The bats continued to attack.

Dori cried out in desperation. She half stood and threw herself against the window to her left. The bus began to roll forward. She hit the window again and again, banging her hands and forehead against the pane until bat blood mingled with her own blood and bat cries joined hers.

The bus angled toward the road divider, then rammed against it and stopped. Tires squealed as cars braked. A van smashed into the rear of the bus, jolting it forward. Horns blared angrily. Behind her, passengers screamed and shouted. But Dori wasn’t aware of any of them. Her world was bounded by bats and defined by pain.

There were no longer any bats in the air. Two or three of them had latched onto each of the passengers. Most of the riders had folded themselves in the narrow space between their seats and the backs of seats in front of them. They were trying to duck in a face-down position. A few had fallen into the aisles and were pulling at stubborn bats or kicking the air in pain. No one was able to get free of the small, fast-flapping attackers. Not for more than a moment.

Suddenly, the cars went silent.

Then, as one, the bats stopped attacking the passengers and flew in a mad, cat’s cradle pattern toward the door.

A motorist ran to the door to see what was wrong; the middle-aged woman ducked as the bats zigzagged past her. When they were gone, the woman hurried up the steps and knelt beside Dori. The driver was curled in a ball on the floor and crying softly.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked.

“It hurts,” she said. Her face and the backs of her hands were a meshwork of fine, red stripes.

Several men arrived. They ran around the women and checked on the other passengers.

“I called nine-one-one,” she said. “The police are on the way. You’re going to be all right.”

Dori attempted to get up. She was trembling. The woman gently pushed her back.

“Don’t move.”

“My passengers-”

“You stay still, Ms. Dryfoos,” the woman said, reading her name tag. “They’re being looked after.”

“The bats?” Dori said.

“They’re gone. They flew off.”

Dori used the side of her hand to wipe blood from her eyes. Still shaking, she said, “Emergency brake,” and pointed to a spot under the steering wheel. “Push it.”

“Of course.” As the woman went over to engage it, she looked out the windshield. She froze.

“Ms. Dryfoos, how do you close the door?” she asked urgently.

“The lever-there,” Dori replied. “Why? What is it?”

The woman quickly pushed the bar. “Because the bats are coming back,” she said. “A lot of them.”

Gentry was sitting back on the couch, enjoying the late summer breeze coming through the window and watching the end of some police show on TV. His eyes were half shut and his mood was one of dreamy satisfaction. He liked knowing that Nancy had fallen asleep in his bedroom, in his bed. Nancy Joyce was not a woman who needed looking after. But she did need sleep, badly, and it made him happy to know that she was comfortable enough to take it here.

His contentment evaporated when the show was interrupted by a news bulletin. Gentry was alert immediately.

“Good evening, I’m Patrick McDermot,” said the local New York anchor. “There is a developing situation in upper Manhattan. For more information, we’re going live to reporter Kathy Leung. Kathy?”

If Kathy was in New York, it had to be bats.

“ Nancy!” Gentry shouted as Kathy came on. He grabbed the remote and punched up the volume. “ Nancy, come here!”

He heard her stumble from the bed.

Kathy said, “Pat, just over an hour ago, a commuter bus starting across the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey was attacked by bats. According to passengers of the bus, the batspoured from the lavatory in the back and attacked every one of the seventeen people onboard, including the driver. Though there were no fatalities, that was only the start of what’s shaping up to be amajor problem for the city of New York.”

Nancy shuffled into the living room. She was round-shouldered and bleary-eyed. “What’s wrong?”

“A bat attack on the George Washington Bridge,” Gentry said.

Joyce was instantly alert. She remained standing as she watched.

“What you’re looking at now,” Kathy continued, “is a view of the skies over the Hudson River. Immediately after the attack on the bus,thousands of bats began gathering over the river. What’s astonishing is that they’ve remained in the skies as their numbers swell.”

“Kathy,” the anchor asked, “where are these bats coming from?”

“Ernie, it seems like they’re coming fromall over,” she said. “We’ve been talking to air traffic controllers at JFK and LaGuardia, at Newark, White Plains, and as far north as Newburgh. Their radar has been picking up movement that’snot attributable to aircraft. They say it’s being made by bats.”

“Do you have binoculars?” Joyce asked.

“In the closet.” He pointed to the hall.

Joyce hurried over.

“What are you going to do?” Gentry asked.

“I want to get to the river,” she said. “See what’s happening.”

Gentry grabbed his pager, pulled on his shoes, and ran after her.

It was only a block to the West Side Highway. Traffic was thin and Joyce didn’t wait for the light. She ran across, Gentry beside her. They jogged onto the pier at the end of Christopher Street. The wide, reconstructed deck extended several hundred feet into the Hudson, and during summer days it was jammed with sunbathers. Tonight there were about two dozen people. All of them were standing and looking north. They had probably been here already, enjoying the evening, when someone noticed what was happening.

Joyce reached the end of the pier and looked north through the binoculars. “Holy Mother of God.”

Gentry peered up the river. Four police patrol boats had stopped around the lower Eighties. They were shining their spotlights up and toward the north. It looked like a scene out of an old war movie: the white lights crisscrossing against the black sky with waves of enemy aircraft moving overhead. Only instead of planes they were bats. More police boats would probably be taking up positions north and south of the bridge to keep sea traffic from the area.

“It looks like they’re coming south,” Gentry said.

“No, they’re spreading,” Joyce informed him.

“Spreading as in spreading out?”

“No. The group is growing. The bats are flying back and forth. Like a loom, knitting in and out.”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. Waiting, maybe. It looks like a holding pattern. The bats that are already there wait for new bats to arrive. As more bats show up, they join the perimeter.”

“Why?”

“I wonder-” she said thoughtfully.

Gentry’s pager beeped. It was a Manhattan number he didn’t recognize.

“What do you wonder?” Gentry asked.

“Do you have to check that out?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell you when you get back. I want to think it through.”

Gentry ran back toward the shore. There was a pay phone on the other side of the highway, and Gentry called the number.

It rang once before someone answered. “Yes?”

“Hi. This is detective Robert Gentry-”

“Detective,” said the voice, a husky monotone, “this is Gordon Weeks, Office of Emergency Management.”

So the guano has hit the fan,Gentry thought. Gordy Weeks was the big gun, “the lion tamer,” the press had dubbed him. In a crisis situation, the former marine called all the plays. Even Mayor Taylor deferred to him, and Taylor-a longtime FBI man who’d run the bureau’s New York field office-was not hesitant to take charge in most situations.

“I’m told you’ve been working with Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo,” Weeks said.

“That’s right.”

“We’ve been trying to find her.”

“She’s with me,” Gentry said. “I’m at a pay phone. We’re out on the Christopher Street pier watching the bats.”

“Can you get her down to SevenWorld Trade Center?”

“Sure-”

“Robert!”

Joyce was running across the highway. A car had to jam on its brakes to keep from hitting her. She didn’t seem to notice. He had never seen her this driven.

“Hold on,” Gentry said into the phone. “Nancy’s coming. I think something’s up.”

“Something is,” Weeks said, “bats. They’re stretched from the George Washington Bridge down to just below the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. I need a think tankfast and ESU said she may have answers-”

“Wait a second, sir,please! ” Gentry said. “She’s pretty agitated. She may have something.”

“Look, I’ve got the police commissioner on the other line,” Weeks said. “Call me back as soon as possible.”

Gentry said he would. The OEM director hung up.

Joyce arrived, breathless. She leaned against the phone. “Robert, I need to get above the bats.”

“Above? You mean upriver?”

“No, I mean higher than. Can you get me a helicopter?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“Because I think I know what’s happening, and I need to make certain.”

“What’s happening?”

Joyce said, “The courtiers are being assembled. The king is already here. And I believe the queen is on her way.”

As they hurried back to Gentry’s apartment, the detective told Joyce that if the Office of Emergency Management apparently had been put in charge of the crisis, Gordy Weeks would have to okay her plan to fly up into the bats.

“There may not be time to visit him and do a whole conference thing. Will he listen to me over the phone?”

“I think so,” Gentry said.

“And will he listen tome?”

“He asked for you by name,” Gentry said. “Look, I know Gordy Weeks only by reputation. He doesn’t let bureaucracy, red tape, ego, or gender get in the way of fixing problems. He also doesn’t have a lot of time to screw around here. They’ll probably have to close the harbor, the Hudson air lane into LaGuardia-can’t afford to have bats sucked into jet engines. He’ll listen and you’ll get a quick yea or nay.”

“How much clout does he have?”

“In a crisis, Weeks reports directly to Taylor. And I don’t think the mayor has ever gotten in the way of anything he wanted.”

As they entered the apartment and Gentry punched in the phone number, Joyce quickly assembled her facts. Robert was right. A manager in the middle of an unprecedented crisis wouldn’t have much time to listen-or to argue. She would have to make her point fast.

It was clear to her that the Russian female had had at least twin offspring, possibly more. The same bat could not have attacked the ESU team in New York and killed those sheep in New Paltz. And a male bat would not have come ahead, alone, to prepare a new home for another male bat. But a male bat would have come ahead for a female. He would have found a nest, settled in, and then relayed his signature cry from bat to bat-a distinctive series of bleats that would have told her exactly where he was.